A life spent buried in video games, scraping by on meagre pay from irregular work or dependent on others, might seem empty and sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one spent buried in finance, accumulating points during long hours at the office while neglecting other aspects of life, is a matter of perspective.

File this under this month’s humor section: a 30-year old man had to be sued by his parents to get him to move out of their house

Ditto, but the darker variety: story of a man who remained functionally illiterate while being a high school teacher. Choice quote:

Why did I go into teaching? Looking back it was crazy that I would do that. But I’d been through high school and college without getting caught – so being a teacher seemed a good place to hide. Nobody suspects a teacher of not knowing how to read.

In this process, which scientists call ‘ballooning’, the spider creates a sail-like web that catches the breeze, allowing it to travel distances as short as a few meters or embark on epic journeys that can take them up into the jet stream or as far as remote islands in the ocean.

I found some old advertisements that I liked, but I liked them so much I made the one-liner into a separate post.

I’ve been watching a bit of “Thomas the Train Engine” with my daughter, and have a growing unease at the back of my mind each time I do, but this person nails the reason why; will never be able to look at it the same way again (!)

I feel terrible that I never paid attention to this line at the beginning of The Big Lebowski, so here’s someone over-analyzing it

Something that doesn’t fit anywhere: about seeking, and insights (also has something to say about the Matrix, and about just doing)

The “canon wars” continue on (I’m very pessimistic about all this; readers who’ve seen me mention Allan Bloom in the past know which side of the fence I sit on, though)

Regular readers may have noticed my fondness for historical advertising (of a very specific kind). Here are some old advertisements by Bohn Aluminum that I came across, and here is a bigger list. This stuff dates from the 1940s.

These look like the background design of Bioshock and you can’t imagine seeing something like this today, but the real story here (I think) is how it used to be possible to imagine building big stuff in a positive sense, and how everyone almost took it for granted that “wonderful infrastructure” was going to come, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, but it was going to come.

Today, it’s hard to find believers of that sort. Today, this giant rocket airplane, with five decks, would draw either a laugh, or a smirk, or worse, but for a brief period it might have drawn admiration.

This month’s “art pick” are sketches by Alexey Feodosievich Wangenheim, who was the first head of the Soviet Union’s weather bureau in the 1930s, and drew these while spending the rest of his life in the Gulag.

Maya civilisation, at its peak some 1,500 years ago, covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, with an estimated population of around five million.

”With this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there,” said Mr Estrada-Belli, “including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”

The archaeologists were struck by the “incredible defensive features”, which included walls, fortresses and moats.

They showed that the Maya invested more resources into defending themselves than previously thought, Mr Garrison said.

One of the hidden finds is a seven-storey pyramid so covered in vegetation that it practically melts into the jungle.